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NoFap was founded in June 2011 by Alexander Rhodes after a thread on Reddit about a 2003 Chinese study[note 1] that found that men who refrain from masturbation for seven days experience a 145.7% spike in testosterone levels on the seventh day. This hit the front page of a popular forum on Reddit.[1][4] Alexander Rhodes appears in the documentary written and directed by Nicholas Tana called Sticky: A (Self) Love Story, in which he discusses his findings and his opinions about masturbation.[5]

After this, Rhodes created NoFap as a "subreddit" forum community on Reddit.[1] At first, NoFap ran weekly and monthly challenges for a small group of people on the forum, and then the NoFap administrators created a day counter system. Now forum members set their own challenges based upon their own personal goals.[1] The endeavour is sometimes referred to as fapstinence.[6][7][8]

Users on NoFap's subreddit more than tripled in number in two years, leading Rhodes to build an off-Reddit forum at NoFap.com and begin other plans to better serve the website's fast-growing factions in Brazil, Germany, and China.[9] NoFap.com is a forum-style website where individuals who have committed to abstain from pornography and masturbation for a period of time can talk about their experiences and engage in challenges to help them recover. NoFap.com is the sister website of the Reddit-hosted NoFap community.[10]

After abstaining from porn and masturbation for a period of time, some of NoFap's users claim to experience "dramatic increases in social confidence, energy, concentration, mental acuity, motivation, self-esteem, emotional stability, happiness, sexual prowess, and attractiveness to the opposite sex".[18][1] Some NoFap users say their brains were warped by porn, at the expense of real relationships.[19][20]

Nofap hosts a wide variety of different opinions on sexual health, and supports users with various goals as long they are trying to improve their sexual health.[21] NoFap techniques are sometimes cited as an improvement method by members of the manosphere.[22]

Behavioral scientists have used statistics gathered from NoFap to study addiction.[29] Robert Weiss of The Huffington Post sees NoFap as part of a tech backlash.[30] The endeavor has also been criticized as generating embarrassing side effects such as prolonged or unwanted erections in men or an excessive libido.[31]

The Reddit-based PornFree group is similar to NoFap, focusing on giving up porn rather than masturbation and mainly on overcoming addiction.[32]

^Subedar, Anisa (June 24, 2017). "The online groups of men who avoid masturbation". BBC. Retrieved September 23, 2017. NoFap' is an organisation that supports its users regardless of what their goals might be as long as they're trying to improve their sexual health and live their sexual habits in a way that they want to," he says, pointing out that abstinence is not the ultimate aim of all participants. "We don't have a unified goal. Some people want to masturbate some people don't want to masturbate - it hosts a wide variety of people with different viewpoints.

^Coon, Dennis; Mitterer, John O. (2014). "11. Gender and Sexuality". Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior (14 ed.). Cengage Learning. p. 363. ISBN978-1-305-54500-7. Is there any way that masturbation can cause harm? Seventy years ago, a child might have been told that masturbation would cause insanity, acne, sterility, or other such nonsense. "Self-abuse," as it was then called, has enjoyed a long and unfortunate history of religious and medical disapproval (Caroll, 2013). The modern view is that masturbation is a normal sexual behavior (Hogarth & Ingham, 2009). Enlightened parents are well aware of this fact. Still, many children are punished or made to feel guilty for touching their genitals. This is unfortunate because masturbation itself is harmless. Typically, its only negative effects are feelings of fear, guilt, or anxiety that arise from learning to think of masturbation as "bad" or "wrong." In an age when people are urged to practice "safer sex," masturbation remains the safest sex of all.

^Sigel, Lisa Z. (Summer 2004). "Masturbation: The History of the Great Terror by Jean Stengers; Ann Van Neck; Kathryn Hoffmann". Journal of Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 37 (4): 1065–1066. doi:10.1353/jsh.2004.0065. ISSN0022-4529. JSTOR3790078. Stengers and Van Neck follow the illness to its fairly abrupt demise; they liken the shift to finally seeing the emperor without clothes as doctors began to doubt masturbation as a cause of illness at the turn of the twentieth century. Once doubt set in, scientists began to accumulate statistics about the practice, finding that a large minority and then a large majority of people masturbated. The implications were clear: if most people masturbated and did not experience insanity, debility, and early death, then masturbation could not be held accountable to the etiology that had been assigned it. Masturbation quickly lost its hold over the medical community, and parents followed in making masturbation an ordinary part of first childhood and then human sexuality.

^"Masturbation: Questions and Answers"(PDF). McKinley Health Center University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2 April 2008. Archived from the original on 28 December 2015. Retrieved 9 June 2017.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)